CASTLE ROCK, Colo. — There is a movie that plays over and over in Chad Arnold's mind. It starts with the urgent call from down the hall: "Code blue. Room 601." Then Ryan's wife running into his own hospital room. Her words to his sister: "I need you." Chad, still a jumble of IVs and cords and tubes after the liver transplant, wresting himself from his bed and making his way just a few doors down to the room of his brother, his savior.

From the hallway he watched it all. And so the horror is forever ingrained in his memory.

What makes it worse is that they'd both made it out of surgery just fine, that until that moment in the middle of the night the entire process had been a celebration of life — not something to fear, really, but something with a happy ending.

Everything had moved quickly after Ryan received the phone call at their July family reunion confirming he was a match for the liver transplant surgery needed to save Chad's life. Just a week and a half later, the family was back in Colorado preparing for surgery. The night before, they read scripture, shared communion and prepared to keep friends and family elsewhere informed with updates on a website called CaringBridge.

"We look forward to delivering a positive report," the family posted the night of July 28.

The next morning at the University of Colorado Hospital, the brothers swapped jokes. But just before Ryan was led into surgery, Chad walked into his brother's pre-op room and wrapped his arms around him.

"I owe you my life," he whispered to Ryan, who patted Chad on the shoulder and tried, as always, to reassure.

By 5 p.m., it was done. Two-thirds of Ryan's liver was removed and placed into Chad, whose own diseased organ — enlarged to almost three times its normal size — was taken out in chunks. Almost immediately, Chad's jaundiced skin returned to its natural color; the pot belly caused by his swollen liver was gone.

Always the comedian, he posted a quick update on his Facebook page the morning after the surgery: "Well, that stung a little."

Chad, so sick for so long, felt the best he had in years. He asked his family to crank up The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling," and he danced, or tried to, in his bed. Through family members, he sent messages to Ryan. "Tell him I'm feeling good. Tell him I love him."

Ed Andrieski
/
AP

Chad Arnold holds back tears as he talks about his brother Ryan, who died after donating part of his liver to Chad.

It was as if they'd switched places. While Chad was up and walking, Ryan was having a harder time. The family kept posting updates:

On Friday, July 30, at 11:59 a.m.: "Ryan is doing well this morning. Groggy from the medicine but (fairly) comfortable. ... It's taken awhile for it all to sink in, Chad is functioning with Ryan's liver . . . almost doesn't seem real."

On Friday, July 30, at 11:45 p.m.: "Ryan was just moved out of ICU and onto the transplant floor so he is now just a few rooms down from Chad. Chad went on two walks today ... up and down the hallway twice! ... Ryan has been pretty groggy today, which is normal."

On Saturday, July 31, at 3:44 p.m.: "Well, today is Day 3. We have been told from the beginning that this is perhaps the most difficult day, especially for the donor. ... Things are improving this afternoon, but again last night, Ryan did not sleep well and has been in quite a bit of pain."

Arnold Family
/
AP

Ryan Arnold, in the doorway, visits his brother Chad lying in bed in his hospital room after the liver transplant surgery. Their father, Robert Arnold, is at right.

On Sunday, Aug. 1, at 10:18 a.m.: "Unfortunately things took a turn for the worse last night. Ryan went code blue and was resuscitated. He is now in critical condition. We ask that you stand in faith and fight with us. ... Death can't have him."

On Monday, Aug. 2, at 11:04 p.m.: "Ryan went to be with Jesus this afternoon."

A recovery filled with sadness, guilt
"This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers."

Did the questions begin immediately? Not exactly. That's all part of the process, isn't it? The internal tug-of-war between doubt and determination.

Sometimes Chad's thankful for the drugs that leave some of the images of those days hazy. He does remember wondering, in the fog of it all, whether his friends and family were watching him too closely, especially that Monday when tests showed that Ryan's brain was no longer functioning and his family removed him from life support.

It was their father who delivered the news. He entered the room where Chad slept and grabbed his toes to wake him, the way he did when Chad was a boy. And then he said, ever so gently: "Ryan's brain is dead, but we still serve a good God."

Chad acknowledges it might once have been his nature to rip out all those tubes and IVs and jump from the hospital window. But he wasn't living just for himself anymore.

It was the promise he made to Ryan when he went later that Monday to say goodbye. Looking at his younger brother, Chad told him: "I'm going to do this because I know this is what you want from me. I'm going to live fully. I'm going to live for both of us."

The author C.S. Lewis, who lost both his mother and his wife to cancer, once wrote in a treatise on grief that "part of every misery is ... the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Chad never really had a choice but to think of it all nearly every moment. His entire existence was about healing, the healing not just of his body but of his heart now, too.

All of the rituals of grieving that are meant to help find closure — the funeral and the burial, one final goodbye — Chad got none of that. He was released from the hospital just before Ryan's service but wasn't well enough to travel home to South Dakota to attend.

Then complications sent him back to the hospital — to the same sixth floor where the doctors had worked to resuscitate Ryan. For several weeks, he was just two doors down from Ryan's old room, walking past it dozens of times a day as part of an exercise regimen meant to help him "heal."

That word itself seemed a joke. All those nights in the hospital, Chad stayed up for hours with his sister and his cousin talking about Ryan and how to go on. What is my life really about now? he asked himself. Then one day a visiting co-worker said something that stuck with Chad: Everything that Chad now expressed was prompting this man to reassess his own life. Perhaps, his friend suggested, the pain that had so altered Chad could somehow help others.

What if he could turn the tragedy of Ryan's death into something redemptive?

On Aug. 18, nine days after Ryan was laid to rest, Chad wrote his first online journal entries while still in the hospital. He began with a few Bible citations.

The first entry written entirely in his own hand was tagged with the word "guilt."

"Well I thought I'd just start off with addressing the 300-pound Gorilla in the room. It's the thing most people are concerned about with me. ... So Chad, how can you drag yourself out from the weight of self-condemnation? How can you ever live a normal life again?"

He went on to recall how Ryan lived his own life "selflessly and positively," how he even texted Chad a few days before the surgery to say, "I believe in you."

"He believes in me why? To do what?" Chad wrote. "I can tell you this much. It didn't mean I should waste time — which he treasured every minute of and sacrificed his own to give me more of — on feeling guilty."

And yet with each new meditation, Chad fought to stave off that demon. "Why Ryan, God? Why not me? What about all the prayers? " he wrote. "If you think I haven't asked these questions — you're wrong. ... If you think I haven't yelled at God — I'm sorry and you're wrong."

He kept wondering: What if he'd just waited for a cadaver donor? Then a hospital worker told him his was one of the most diseased livers she'd seen and he likely had only months to live. That helped, some.

He regretted his father having to come out of retirement to keep open his orthodontics practice, which Ryan had been taking over.

When Chad was released the second time from the hospital, he was so happy to be home with his wife and two sons again, to hold his boys tightly and kiss them goodnight. Then the realization hit that Ryan, and his wife and three boys, would no longer have those moments.

Ed Andrieski
/
AP

Chad Arnold sits with his wife Christine and sons Luke, left, and Jake at their home in Castle Rock, Colo.

He tried to focus on healing his body. Mornings on the treadmill, twice-weekly checkups, lab work. He eased back into his work at Compassion International, where he coordinated with churches to assist children in poverty, and he approached his job with new vigor and perspective; he now knew what it meant to suffer.

He also set new priorities for his life, guided by the things that were once so important to Ryan: Faith, family, friendship. He vowed to spend more time with his kids, be more patient and loving to his wife, visit his parents more often, lean on his friends more.

And he documented nearly every step. For Chad, writing about the memories and misery was not only a way to remember Ryan, it was cathartic. It seemed to be helping others, too. Friends, family and many, many strangers began following Chad's journal, some posting comments about how they had been moved to live differently.

Arnold Family
/
AP

Ryan Arnold is survived by his wife, Shannon, and sons Graham, Owen and Oliver, shown posing for a Christmas card at their home in Watertown, S.D.

"Here is what I am trying to use your inspiration for: living FULLY AWAKE as much as possible," one wrote.

"Time is so stinkin' short," said another. "I've attempted in my feeble ways to make each day count."

Someone else revealed, "We are now a family that says 'I love you' & gives each other hugs every single day rather than just assuming we each know & that's huge for us. ... My heart aches at the loss you all have suffered but I am encouraged, inspired, & strengthened every single time I read one of your blogs."

When he struggled, Chad's readers urged him on.

"Chad, you have come too far to give up now! ... You are making a mark that will never be erased," one wrote.

"I wonder if you realize how inspirational your blogs are," wrote another, "or how heroic YOU are."

Finding a balance between grief and hope
"Today there's a picnic put on by the hospital to honor liver donors and recipients. I was asked to go but there was no way. Today, I don't want to remember I'm a liver recipient. ... Today, I don't want to be a part of this story."

— Journal entry called, "My Psalm."

A few weeks after Ryan's death, Chad sat one morning in his living room drinking a weight-gainer shake of blueberries and bananas. His sister, Janelle, sipped coffee across from him as their children played. Before him was a stack of pills: Antibiotics, anti-rejection meds, Prilosec and others.

It was, health-wise, a good day. Emotionally it was quite different.

"Today's a hard day for me."

"Reality?" Janelle asked softly, and tears formed in Chad's eyes.

"I think when I start to feel better, they're harder days. For some reason I like to hold onto the pain. When I don't feel the pain, there's a tinge of ... "

He stopped, and then: "I say I don't feel guilty, and I don't spend a lot of time on it, but there is that tinge that you start to feel a little bit. And then, later on, I'll be fine."

Summer has turned to fall, and still it's like that. A tinge one moment, "fine" the next. "For now, it's between grief and hope," says Janelle. "You just live there."

Ryan's autopsy report called his death natural due to a lack of oxygen to the brain following cardiac arrest. It said "poorly delineated" complications of the surgery may have put undue stress on the heart, and it found that Ryan had a slightly enlarged heart, which may have made him susceptible to irregular rhythms. Both the hospital and the medical examiner agreed that until the cardiac arrest, Ryan seemed to be stable.

"Do I actually have something to put my finger on to say this caused his death? No," said Dr. Michael Burson, who performed the autopsy.

The University of Colorado Hospital, which had temporarily halted live-donor liver transplants, has since resumed the program. Internal and external reviews found no deficiencies in the program itself, but personnel will now continuously monitor donors post-surgery with machines that sound an alarm if blood oxygen levels drop and a patient stops breathing. In a statement, the hospital said: "Ryan's passing will not be in vain."

Chad still makes the same pledge to himself, despite ongoing complications that recently brought some devastating news:

He may not be able to keep Ryan's liver.

Within the last two weeks, due to a buildup of fluids that indicates the transplanted liver isn't yet functioning properly, Chad was placed on the waiting list for a cadaver liver. He, his family and his doctors are taking things day by day, still hoping that his recovery has been slower than usual but that, in time, Ryan's liver will work for Chad. But if a cadaver liver becomes available, Chad has decided to undergo another transplant.

In that, he feels he has no choice. The one thing he can control: He refuses to ever again accept a live donation; the responsibility is just too great.

Ed Andrieski
/
AP

Chad Arnold's wife, Christine, fixes the blanket on his bed at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, Colo., on Sept. 2, 2010, a month after his brother, Ryan, died.

"If Ryan hadn't done what he did, I'd be dead," he says. "I'm not going to put that on anybody else. If I don't make it waiting for a cadaver, I'd rather have that than to have anything else."

Chad can't help feeling as though he'll have failed, somehow, if he has to accept another liver. Having that piece of Ryan forever with him had helped ease some of the pain of his brother's loss. As he wrote in a blog entry last week: "I am faced with the cold hard truth that I may not get to keep what has been the only redeeming thing in all of this."

Then again, he knows Ryan wouldn't want him to feel that way. He knows what his little brother would have said about the possibility of a second transplant.

"At the end of the day, if I have to to live, I have to to live," says Chad. "Ryan would tell me to do that."

The strong faith that always helped his family conquer adversity is helping them all endure, still. Chad may ask "why" and "how," but he knows those questions don't really have answers. Faith, he wrote in a blog passage, is "the thing you cling to when you're taking your last breath in a freezing river whose current is too strong. Well, the current is too strong for me right now, and so I'm clinging."

And so his journey goes on, a process that involves hard work, more prayers for healing and days filled with memories, some happy, some haunting. Nights can be especially hard. Sometimes he wakes up crying and his wife, Cristine, tries to just listen.

"Chad's heart is to honor Ryan," she says. "He's taking an inventory of his life, and I think he wants to challenge others to do that."

At the top of his journal, Chad poses the question, "Why am I doing this?" And he attempts to explain, saying he's trying to get healthy — physically, mentally and emotionally — and will never stop trying.

"I've had some time — too much maybe — to process the hardest questions of faith and life after living through my absolute worst nightmare. But here I am," he writes, "and somehow at the bottom of ... all the pain and grief and fear and guilt there is a hope that shimmers all the way back to the top.

"So," he concludes, "here goes everything."

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Video: ‘Selfless’ father dies donating liver to brother

>>>we are back now at 8:09 with a story of a man who died of a
liver transplant
. just days after the surgery, tragedy.

>> reporter: for the
arnold family
, it's a story of sacrifice and survival.

>>okay, well, that's okay.

>> reporter: chad arnold has had
liver disease
for a decade, but a few months back, he took a turn for the worst and desperately needed a transplant. but the wait for a cadaver liver was years long and chad had only months, that's when chad's
younger brotherryan
offered to be a living donor and wouldn't take no for an answer.

>>my sister, of the same blood type wanted to do it. he wouldn't even let her in the ring. he said no, i'm going to do it.

>> reporter: this is
ryan
visiting chad's hospital room after it was over.

>>i thought we were in the clear. i felt healthier than i have in years and it was all
blue skies
from there.

>>but
ryan
, husband and dad to three
young boys
was dead from
cardiac arrest
. doctors say what happened to the arnolds is rare. of the 4,000 living donor transplants in the u.s. over two decades, only three deaths.

>>we just had no idea that there was any danger approaching us.

>> reporter: a heart breaking story that has now taken yet another devastating turn. the organ is not working as well as expected, chad may not be able to keep his brother's liver.

>>if you could have one more conversation with
ryan
, what would that be?

>>you still want to go through it knowing everything that's going to happen? i think he would say yeah.

>>chad is with us exclusively from
castle rock
, colorado. and his brother is in the studio, good morning to you both. chad, if i can start with you, this has been a very difficult year for you both physically and emotionally, how are you feeling and how is your liver doing?

>>you know, obviously it's not where it should be. it's probably one of the longer recoveries that surgeon also tell you. but we're hopeful, we're starting to see indications. i was actually put on the retransplant list a few weeks ago, but indications are starting to show a turn that things are starting to kick in and hopefully we're getting close here to the homestretch where, you know, i'll be able to keep
ryan
's liver, that's our hope, obviously.

>>you have pfc. is that correct?

>>that's right.

>>it's a disease that inflames and scars the tissues and the bile ducts of the liver and there is no cure for this, so you needed a new liver, it was the only way that you could survive. what was your reaction when your brother said to you, i'm going to deal with this, i'm going to be the one?

>>huge gratitude, very humbling obviously. it's just something that, you know, you hope for, you pray for, you kind of dread too, though, you don't want to put someone that you love through that. but we had a lot of peace about it. and man, just tremendous gratitude, all the way up until even through the surgery. i can't say enough about what
ryan
did for me.

>>and when you heard that
ryan
was going to do this, no surprise?

>>not really,
ryan
was a very selfless person, he was always there for his friends and his family. i like to say that he was a hero not just because of how he died but because of how he lived. he was the ultimate father, husband, brother, friend, son and i'm just so proud of him. yeah, really proud of him.

>>after the surgery,
ryan
admitted it wasn't a
piece of cake
, but no one expected him to die from this. do you have any better understanding of what went wrong?

>>you know, the medical examiner has ruled it a
cardiac arrest
. none of the doctors -- none of us are satisfied with that answer. but looking at what happened and what could have been done differently.

>>i know that his wife shannon wrote to you that
ryan
made her feel as though she had been completely loved and it's apparent that
ryan
felt the same way about you, that he loved you very dearly and i don't know if guilt comes into play here at all, when you're trying to figure out, maybe if i hadn't accepted this donation from him. do you ever wish that you could trade places with him?

>>well, obviously guilt is something that, you know, i call it the 300-
pound gorilla
in the room, it's always there, it's something that i choose to take up or not.
ryan
and i talked before hand about if something went wrong, what would we do? obviously i can't change places with hill. but i have a hope, because of what i believe that i will be united with him one day. but in the meantime, i want to live a life that honors how he lived and what rob said, it's a selfless kind of love and a life that i want to mirror after and that's all i can do.

>>and i know you work for
compassion international
that tries to raise awareness about children living in poverty. how has this experience changed the way you feel about what you do or augmented the way you feel about what you do?

>>yeah, it's certainly affected it. i was very fortunate to have our president come to my hospital room immediately after
ryan
had died and i was still recovering and he actually came up a few times and one of the things he said to me that just struck me and will stick with me. he said, chad, you know the things that qualify me to be able to lead this organization more than anything is that i know how to suffer, i grew up on the i'vory coast. i have held my friends while they died. and now you know how to suffer. there's a heightened sensitivity, that if nothing else, that's something that i hope doesn't leave and that's something that's always inside of me that i notice others in need around me and kind of live a life outside of myself.